Re: CVS bashing?

[Mike Castle]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 04:44:49PM -0400, Eric Siegerman wrote:
> > Merging is very primitive 
> 
> Hmmm.  How could it be better?  NOT a rhetorical question; I'd
> really like to know.  (I haven't used the commercial ones he's
> comparing CVS to.)

I've recently started working at a perforce shop.  One thing that perforce
does with it's merging is, instead of doing a default merge, it gives you
options:

Keep your changes only, keep the other set of changes only, or merge the
changes.

Granted, in my experience, 99% of the time you want to merge the changes.
But every once in a while, you don't.  (and it's usually not determined by
a file type so you can't use cvswrappers to control it).

Otherwise, I've not been convinced that things like changesets where you
pick and choose which bits and pieces get included into a particular source
file (ala clearcase) is worth it.  Just the administrative overhead would
be obnoxious! :->

One place I would like to see improvements is the ability to automatically
be able to track how branches were synced up together so that changes
aren't reapplied.  Yes, this can be done easily with scripts.  But having
to write scripts portable to various environments is a bit of a pain (ie,
making sure everyone has perl on their machines, or writing tools in Bourne
and batch, and so forth).  It's a tough selling point at times to say "Yes,
we can easily work around that limitation, but we'll have to write a couple
of extra tools."   (Ignoring the fact that no matter what SCM tool we use,
we're still going to have to write our own wrappers around it.)

mrc
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